Holt Integrated Circuits, a world leader in data bus IC's for the avionics and military industries, today announced the introduction of HI-3598, an ARINC 429 protocol IC with eight receive channels, one digital transmit channel and an SPI host interface.

The HI-3598 provides a single device interface between eight ARINC 429 receive busses and any host microcontroller supporting an SPI bus interface. The digital transmit channel can be utilized with an external line driver such as HI-8571 to relay information from multiple sources, for example sensors, to a single collection point such as a flight computer. Each on-chip receiver provides user-programmable label recognition for up to 16 labels and can buffer up to four ARINC data words in individual FIFOs. The status of each receive FIFO can be monitored by external interrupt pins or by polling the status register. The SPI interface greatly reduces board space when compared to a 16-bit parallel interface, and coupled with the eight receive channels, provides a significant saving in board space for multi-channel applications. Other features include an internal loopback mode for self-test, the ability to switch the bit significance of the ARINC 429 label and recognize the 32nd received ARINC bit as either data or a parity flag. Different input resistance values are also available to allow easy implementation of external lightning protection circuitry.

The HI-3599 provides identical features except for individual external FIFO interrupt pins. This gives the user the option of utilizing a smaller 24-pin SOIC package with very little trade off in features. In this case, a global interrupt flag allows the user to poll the status register to check status of the individual receive FIFOs.

"This product complements our other suite of SPI interface ARINC offerings, HI-3585, HI-3587 and HI-3588, providing customers with the most flexible and compact ARINC solutions on the market today", said Anthony Murray, Director of Business Development at Holt.

The HI-3598 and HI-3599 both operate from 3.3V or 5V supplies and are available in Industrial or full extended (-55oC to +125oC) temperature range with RoHS compliant (lead free) options. Samples of both parts are available immediately.

Readers interested in learning more about Holt's range of ARINC or MIL?STD?1553 products should contact Holt at (949) 859-8800, by e-mail at info@holtic.com, or by visiting the Holt Web site at www.holtic.com.